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BEE BREAD, TEETH OF LION & EYE OF DAY

photo: Phil Stellen, Wikicommons

The gardens and parks of London are for the
most part swathes of grass, acres of green, sown, kept, controlled, rolled, cut
to a verdant carpet-like perfection. Yet the green of even the most attended to
of lawns is sprinkled and patterned with incomers, and the most familiar, most
cherished and most recognisable are the clovers, the dandelions and the
daisies. As gardening styles have developed and as grass seed mixes have
changed, so these native species have evolved to cope. There is nothing of use
or interest for the city’s pollinators in the endless green of the capital’s
lawns, but there is plenty for them in the ground level pollen and nectar of
these three flowers, and many insects make their homes and forage amongst them.
A pattern of white or and pinkly-red clover, of detergent-clean daisies and
thickly yellow dandelions will sprinkle the grass of any London lawn if given
half a chance.

There was once a governor of the Bank of
England who was so keen on honeybees and he kept hives on the roof of the Bank
itself. Whenever Robin Leigh-Pemberton, governor between 1983 and 1993, needed
a break from running the nation’s finances, he would disappear onto the roof,
don his beekeeping suit, and tend to his hives. It is difficult to believe, as
one approaches the sheer fortress walls of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street,
that at the heart of this building, (a building so vast and secret that it is
deeper underground than it is above), is the most pristine of gardens with an
immaculately manicured lawn at its centre. Only the Governor himself is allowed
to step on the grass of The Governor’s Garden, I was told, though clearly a
gardener makes regular visits to keep it crew-cut short and trim the box hedges
that surround it. The gardener also has a subversive eye towards wildness, for
a bird box is attached high on one of the garden’s trees and feeders are placed
for any birds that might find their way into this bucolic courtyard.

I visited the garden with the Bank’s
Environmental Manager, to discuss ways in which it could be made wilder, the
sterile annuals replaced with pollinator friendly perennials that would support
the honeybees in the city’s many hives, and the bumble bees, butterflies,
solitary bees, moths and other insects that are to be found wild and plentiful
even this deeply in the heart of London. We also talked of how, if insects
could be encouraged they would support, in turn, the birds that came to feed on
them, the raptors coming to feed on the smaller birds, and so enrich the whole
of the City of London’s urban ecology.

It needs very little to transform a lawn into
something vibrantly full of wildlife, just a little benign neglect. Marks and
Spencer have a building in the very west of London, at Stockley Park. The park
is now a high-tech estate with the likes of Apple and Sony housing their UK
headquarters there. It is hard by Heathrow Airport and planes loom large as
they come in to land. Yet the lakes and lawns and ancient trees of the original
park created by Sir John Bennet in the 17th century are still there and make
for a surprising flora and fauna rich landscape in which the humming tech
giants site their steel and glass buildings. There is a golf course, where the
lawns are for the most part rigorously controlled, and there are 140,000 trees
including an avenue of age-old limes running right through the estate. There
are colonies of feral bees high up in some of the trees, and some keen
beekeepers at Marks and Spencer look after three hives in the garden area
around their building, a pleasant space where staff go to eat their lunches and
a gardening club tends to the pollinator rich planting.

Garden contractors come in to cut the grass
across the lawns. When I helped put in the bees hives I had but one request.
Please could the gardeners, when they came around on their regular visits to
trim the lawns, leave a metre of uncut grass at the edges and let the lawn
there become a strip of meadow? It took a while to persuade the gardeners of
the value of changing their mowing habits, but now the strips of meadow by the
lawns of Stockley Park provide not just forage for the honeybees and other
pollinating insects, but also aesthetic, sensual pleasures for staff eating
their lunch, taking a breath of fresh air, or just waiting for a bus as they
look at the multitudinous flora that now flourishes in the metres of meadow
around the perimeters of the well-kept lawns. The scents from the flowers that
have taken root, their visual diversity beyond the varied greens of the lawns,
and the habitat that has opened up for seeds to be blown in from the plants of
the gardening club, or from the beaks or droppings of over-flying birds, have
made for a wonderful habitat benefiting plant and insect, bird and human. No
doubt seeds occasionally land as they drop from passing airplanes and so add a
serendipitous exoticism to the bio-diversity. The rest of the lawn is now not
mown as severely as once it was, and the ground covering plants that are too
often exterminated by suburban and corporate gardeners in their chimerical
search for the perfect lawn, bloom throughout the year and sprinkle the grass
with constellations of whites and yellows and pinks. Clovers, dandelions and
daisies abound.

Clover

The Royal Horticultural Society says of
clovers, and ‘clover-like species’, that they ‘can be a persistent nuisance in
lawns, showing an ability to survive close mowing and, in some cases, having a
strong resistance to weed killers. They are easily recognised by their
trifoliate (3-leafed) leaves.’ Must the clover really be thought of as a
nuisance? Can we not change our paradigm and see lawnmowers and weed killers as
the true nuisances?

It was Carl Linnaeus, doyen of nineteenth
century classification, the man whose ability to divide the entire natural
world into narrow categories, and whose ordering is still used for all
scientific Latinate naming of living things, who decided that clovers should be
classified according to their three leaves and so be in the genus Trifolium - trefoils in English usage.
Linnaeus’s obsession with the naming of plants and animals was in part because,
as he wrote, ‘if you don’t know the names of things, the knowledge of them is
lost too.’ Yet every living thing had a name long before Linnaeus gave them a
Latin one, had a name indeed from the moment Homo sapiens developed a language to describe the world they lived
in. If you change the names of things the knowledge of them also becomes lost
in another way.

Linnaeus divided the world in the now
familiar ‘Kingdoms’ of Animal, Vegetable and Mineral. Then into classes, which
in turn were subdivided into orders, and orders into families, and families
into genera, and genera into species. Below the species is the vexed question
of sub-species which will keep beekeepers and botanists arguing late into the
night. There are many clovers classified according to the Linnaean system, all
within the Trifolium genus. Clovers
though always had names long before Linnaeus got to work, and it is those names
which over the years have been lost. If the gardeners mowing the lawns at
Stockley Park, or the Governor of the Bank of England, knew that a once common
name for the White Clover was Bee Bread, maybe they would not be so eager to
have it mown and weed-killer-ed out of their grass.

Nectar rich Bee Bread is a staple for all
bees but most especially the bumble bee. While the arboreal honeybee is most at
home at height and in trees and will feast on the nectar in Stockley Park’s
limes, the bumble bee is often a ground dwelling creature and never happier
than foraging on the flowers to be found in our lawns. The Bee Bread, or White
Clover, or Dutch Clover (Trifolium repens),
is just one of many clovers found in our lawns. There are Bird’s-foot Clover,
Western Clover, Alsike Clover, Clustered Clover, Strawberry Clover, Upright Clover,
the poor old Suffocated Clover, its sessile flowers tucked away close to the
ground and beneath its leaves, and there is Red Clover, subject of long and
heated debates amongst England’s beekeepers, many of whom believe its deep
florets to be ill-shaped for nectar extraction by the honeybee and so only a
source of forage for the longer tongued bumble bees which live close by it.

Clover has uses not just for bees. It is an
important silage crop for cattle, harvested while green and the kept succulent by
partial fermentation in silos – hence silage. It also helps fix nitrogen in the
soil and so is a natural alternative to synthetic fertilisers. It is also of
course lucky if you can find one with four leaves.

Dandelions

There is something magical about the
dandelion. As very small children my friends and I thought they really were
from some enchanted realm, that they were the plant of the fairies that would
drink on the liquid that was released when you picked a flower and broke the
stem. Why else would this plant have milk running through it? And when the
yellow flower had gone to be replaced by the round head of gossamer seed pods,
surely that too was magic and a reason the seed head was called a fairy clock.
Blow and see how many puffs it took for all the seeds to disappear on your
breath. That, or the number of seeds left after one blow, was the time in fairy
land. The flower itself has very real connections with time, opening an hour
after sunrise and closing with the setting of the sun. It really is a
rudimentary clock.

And a barometer. The seeds need dry days to
be borne by the wind, and so, when rain is coming, the seed head closes like an
umbrella only to open again once the wet weather has passed. Each seed head has
come from one of the many florets that make up the flower and each has a
single-seeded fruit, an achene, that, attached to a pappus of fine hair, can be
blown for miles, on the wind or a lover’s breath.

As a child with just one blow and eyes
tightly closed, and if all the seeds flew away leaving none behind, you could
make a wish and the wish might come true. Later, moving out of the realms of
fairy magic and childhood, and into the realms of loving and doting, blowing
the seeds away has other meanings. If the seed heads were blown with a mantra of
‘she loves me’ on one breath alternating with ‘she loves me not’ on the next,
the final phrase before the last seeds were blown away could break or elate a
heart. Those last breaths could be as gentle or as strong as was needed to make
the longed-for phrase be the last.

There is some real magic in the milky white
sap of the dandelion. As children we used this sticky latex (similar in its
make up to the rubber of rubber trees) for cuts and grazes and so had no need
to run home for minor scrapes. It has for long been used as a balm for warts
and corns. Perhaps our childhood remedy was from atavistic remembrance of
ancient folk remedies, or perhaps we learnt through trial and error, or
instinct, that nature had put the plant there for us, marking it out with the
brilliant yellow flowers amongst expanses of grass and clover.

The yellow is as vibrant as another truth teller
of love, the buttercup. A buttercup under the chin will sometimes reflect its
colour up onto the neck and if that yellow reflection is seen then you truly
are in love. The dandelion flower works in the same way too but, being more
golden, is more often thought of as an indicator of future wealth in a child
whose chin reflects back its golden colour.

Dandelions are a great source of nectar
(though not pollen) for the honeybee, one of the first flowers to bloom in the
spring and still in flower as the year comes to an end and everything around it
has ceased blooming. When the early settlers brought the honeybee to the
Americas, they brought dandelions with them too for their bees to feed on.

It is not just bees that enjoy feeding on the
dandelion. Every part of the plant is edible by humans. There is the yellow
flower itself, there is the long stem which comes complete with its own milky
dressing; and there are the vitamin-rich leaves, the ‘dent-de-lion’ or lion’s
teeth that have become anglicised to give the plant its name. The leaves are
more nutritious than spinach and as tasty as their relative chicory.

It was once commonly cultivated in England.
In London in the 1890s Richard Jeffries noted that what had once been a country
crop had by then become an urban food: ‘In spring the dandelions here [Moseley
Lock, Kingston] are pulled in sackfuls to be eaten as salad. It seems now to be
an urban food forgotten in the countryside.’ It is one of the simplest and most
readily available of forage crops easily found not just in garden lawns but
springing up in cracks and concrete throughout the city.

Daisies

‘The
daisy, the daisy she sits in the grass

Where
little birds nest and the little lambs pass

She
grows oh she grows in a fine silver ring

And
when there are twelve it is the sweet spring.’

- The Posy Rhyme, Jackie Oates

The daisy is a flower of childhood innocence,
of children sitting on summer lawns, picking the flowers and fashioning them
into chains, cutting small holes in the stems with a fingernail to thread one
onto the other until there are enough for a bracelet or a necklace.Jackie Oates’ recording is a setting of a
song found in Ruth Tongue’s collection ‘The Chime Child’. Tongue who died in
1981 believed herself to be a ‘chime child’, born at the exact ringing of the
church bell. This is one of the songs she collected in her native Somerset. ‘We
children sang this calendar-dance in Calmington Meadows forming a slow circle
with an in-and-out walking step and swinging of arms.’

Daisies are great harbingers of the seasons.
If you can put your foot on twelve daisies at once, it is said, then spring has
really come, and as Tennyson wrote, ‘In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly
turns to thoughts of love.’ Lying in the grass, the sun on their back, the
lovelorn can pick a daisy and, plucking of the petals one by one, as with the
blowing of a dandelion seed head, find out of the object of their affections
whether, ‘they love me’, or ‘they love me not.’ The wrong answer may cause the
heart to be wounded, but at least the daisy can help to heal physical hurts,
having been regarded as a dressing for fresh wounds since time immemorial. It
was once called bruisewort or woundwort.

Daisy became a nickname for girls called
Margaret, and eventually itself a name for English girls.

‘Daisy,
daisy

Give me
your answer do.

I’m
half crazy,

All for
the love of you,’

go the words of Harry Dacre’s music hall
song, almost as familiar today as it was when it was written in 1892. There is
a bigger daisy, the Ox-Eye Daisy, known by the French, in multi-lingual nominal
confusion, as a Marguerite.

Lawns are full of daisies, and they grow so
tightly close to the ground that nothing can grow beneath them. Almost
impossible to eradicate, even by the most ardent Royal Horticulturalist, it is
difficult to imagine an English lawn without them. In Latin it is Bellis perennis meaning ‘everlasting
prettiness’ - bella pretty, perennial everlasting. Of the many daisies in the
world, this is the common daisy, the English daisy, or the lawn daisy. It was
called Mary’s Rose in mediaeval times. The name is a corruption of the ‘day’s
eye’ and like the Japanese Tsukususa and the dandelion, they open up their
flowers with the coming of the sun and sprinkle the green of the grass lawn
with a mirrored heaven of floral stars.Chaucer said of the flower, ‘Well by reason men it call maie / The
Daisie, or else the Eye of the Day’ and you can make out the constellations
amongst them if you search amongst their floral stars. Daisies are remarkable
in flowering from the first day of spring to the very final day of autumn. On
clear summer nights the daisy flowers close up their heads and the
constellations come out in the sky above them. They open up again every
morning, from the Spring Equinox until the Autumn one, no amount of mowing
disturbing them, if anything only helping to spread them across the lawn.

There may be few clovers, dandelions and
daisies to be found lurking in the Governor’s Garden at
the Bank of England, but there are plenty to be seen on the eastern edges of
London where the Bank has its printing works. Behind razor wire and concrete
ramparts of a building where a Bond villain would feel at home, the notes that
we use every day, and many of the currencies in use in other countries around the
world, roll of the presses. Meanwhile the grassy lawns that surround the
high-tech, closely guarded facility have been deliberately allowed to run to
meadow. A mower is used just to cut the occasional pathway through the foliage.
At the far end of one of these pathways, the workers of the Bank of England’s
printing plant keep their bees. The expansive meadow hedged by the railway embankment
on one side and the electrified security fences on the others provides a
pristine haven for wildlife and more forage than any hive of bees could hope
for.